Psychology concepts

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40Explained · every one with checked sources

Backfire Effect
A reported pattern in which correcting a false belief makes some people believe it more strongly, now contested because large replications rarely find it.
Affect Heuristic
A mental shortcut in which a quick good or bad feeling about something is used as information when judging its risk, benefit or value.
Miller's Law
George Miller's 1956 finding that immediate memory holds about seven chunks of information, not seven separate items.
Flow
A mental state of complete absorption in an activity, where challenge and skill are well matched and a person loses track of time while fully focused.
Planning Fallacy
A systematic underestimate of the time, cost and risk of your own plans, made even by people who know that comparable projects overran.
Akrasia
Acting intentionally against your own best judgment: you know the better option, are free to take it, and choose another.
Hedonic Treadmill
The hedonic treadmill is the theory that people return to a fairly stable level of happiness after good or bad life events, because they adapt to new circumstances and compare them with a new normal.
Hindsight Bias
The tendency to see a past outcome as having been predictable, once you already know that it happened.
Passive Wording
Passive wording is writing in the grammatical passive, where the thing acted on is the subject and the doer can be left out.
Paradox of Choice
The finding that more options can reduce, rather than increase, a person's satisfaction with and motivation to make a choice.
Loss Aversion
The tendency for a loss to weigh more heavily than a gain of the same size, because outcomes are judged against a reference point rather than in absolute terms.
Ben Franklin Effect
The tendency to like a person more after doing them a favour, because the helper treats their own act as a sign of liking.
IKEA Effect
The rise in how much people value something they built themselves, which appears only when the building was finished successfully.
Spotlight Effect
The spotlight effect is the tendency to overestimate how much other people notice your appearance, mistakes, and behavior, compared with how much they actually notice.
Bystander Effect
The finding that a person is less likely to help someone in distress when other people are present, because each bystander assumes someone else will act.
Cognitive Dissonance
The discomfort of holding two conflicting beliefs, or acting against a belief, and the pull to make them consistent.
Self-Efficacy
A person's belief in their own ability to carry out the actions needed to reach a specific goal, which shapes how much effort they invest and how long they persist.
Locus of Control
A person's general belief about whether outcomes in their life are caused mainly by their own actions or by forces outside them, such as luck or other people.
Gambler's Fallacy
The mistaken belief that an independent random event is more likely to happen because it hasn't happened recently, even though the odds of each trial never change.
Barnum Effect
The tendency to accept a vague, general personality description as uniquely accurate for you when you believe it was written for you.
Endowment Effect
The tendency to demand far more to give up something you own than you would have paid to acquire the same thing minutes earlier.
Hyperbolic Discounting
The tendency to value a reward much less the moment it is delayed at all, then discount further delays only gradually, instead of discounting every extra day by the same amount.
Peak-End Rule
The peak-end rule says people judge a past experience mostly by its most intense moment and its final moment, not by its total or average.
Zeigarnik Effect
The claim that interrupted tasks are remembered better than finished ones, which a 2025 meta-analysis did not confirm for recall.
Von Restorff Effect
A memory bias where an item that differs from the others around it is remembered better than the uniform items it sits among.
Halo Effect
The tendency to let one positive impression of a person, brand, or product colour judgments of their other, unrelated qualities.
Availability Heuristic
A mental shortcut where people judge how frequent or likely something is by how easily examples come to mind, rather than by the real data.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to search for, favor, and remember evidence that confirms a belief already held, while discounting evidence against it.
Choice Overload
The drop in motivation and satisfaction that happens when there are too many options to choose from, even though more choice felt appealing beforehand.
Framing Effect
The tendency to choose differently between logically identical options depending on whether the outcome is described as a gain or a loss.
Anchoring
The tendency for a number seen just before an estimate to pull that estimate toward it, even when the number is known to be irrelevant.
Priming
A cognitive effect where exposure to one stimulus changes how fast or how a person responds to a later, related stimulus, usually without conscious awareness.
Schema Theory
Schema theory says people understand and remember new information by fitting it into general mental patterns, called schemas, built from past experience, rather than storing each experience whole.
Working Memory
The small amount of information a person can hold in mind and actively work with at once, roughly three to four chunks when rehearsal is prevented.
Cocktail Party Effect
The ability to follow one voice among many speaking at once, and to notice personally relevant words, such as your own name, in speech you are ignoring.
Attentional Blink
A lapse in noticing a second target that appears within about half a second of a first target in a fast stream of items, even when the observer is looking straight at it.
Change Blindness
The failure to notice a large, visible change to a scene when it happens during a brief interruption in viewing, such as a blink, an eye movement, or a video cut.
Inattentional Blindness
Failing to see a fully visible object because attention was committed to something else, even while looking directly at it.
Narrative fallacy
The habit of linking separate past facts into one explanation and trusting it more than the facts support, named by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007.
Goal Gradient Effect
The tendency to put in more effort, and to act sooner, as a goal gets closer, because motivation tracks the share of the original distance that is still left.

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